When Geneviève Guilbault buried the promise of the third road link last month, the traffic flow on the Pierre-Laporte bridge had returned to almost the same level as before the pandemic, and it is already done for the Quebec bridge.
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According to the most recent data obtained by our Parliamentary Office last April, just under 120,000 vehicles traveled on average on the Pierre-Laporte bridge every day.
This is barely 5% less (6,543 vehicles difference) than at the same period in 2019, 11 months before the state of health emergency was declared in Quebec.
Since the start of 2023, the average throughput has continued to increase by around 5,000 vehicles per month.
From 103,353 vehicles registered in January, the monthly average working days (excluding public holidays) climbed to 108,499 in February (+5,146), reaching 114,443 in March (+5,944) and 119,437 (+4,994) in april.
If this progression continues at the same rate, the pre-pandemic level could be reached in the coming weeks on the Pierre-Laporte bridge, a hypothesis that obviously remains to be validated.
However, this has already been a reality for the Quebec Bridge since April 2022. Last month, just under 33,000 vehicles used the old bridge, which dates back to 1919, on average every day. 35,000 a year earlier, almost as many (2% or 861 vehicles difference) as in April 2019, before the pandemic.
The Guilbault firm reacts
Reacting to the newly available April traffic data, the office of the Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Geneviève Guilbault, reminded the Log that the decision to abandon the road component of the Quebec-Lévis tunnel project was made based on “several factors”.
“Including reduced travel times and the total cost of the project”, underlined its director of communications, Maxime Roy. We are talking about 4 to 11 minutes less to go from one city center to another, and $10 billion instead of the $6.5 billion estimated in 2022.
“Travel habits have changed”, also recalled the press secretary of Mme Guilbault, who believes that the “pre-pandemic threshold” has not yet been reached.
At the Blue Room last week, the Deputy Prime Minister also insisted on the new “distribution of ridership” on the two existing bridges.
“You can have the same number of cars passing over the bridge in the same day, but passing at different times from before,” she observed. She then replied to the tabling of a motion by the official opposition “proposing that the Assembly note the difficulties experienced by the government in respecting its commitments”, the volte-face with the third link being “the most recent example”.
“Rush hours are the same, but there are systematically fewer people at peak times,” she summed up, pointing to the effect of teleworking on lifestyles.
We should remember, however, that in their studies, made public last month, the Groupement Union des rives (responsible for the preliminary draft of the Quebec-Lévis tunnel project) and the experts from its ministry warn that it will be necessary to wait another one or two years before measuring the true post-pandemic situation.